Source: Tom Johnston, MEATINGPLACE, 4/9/18


A declining flow of immigrants into the U.S. and aging population of immigrants already in the country is exacerbating challenges in the pork industry’s labor market, according to a study conducted by Iowa State University.

The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) commissioned the study, which it is using to support the organization’s argument for immigration reform that will provide them a larger labor pool.

But the study states that immigration policy is only one of many factors that are changing the landscape in the rural Midwest, particularly in the hog industry.

The biggest threat, say ISU professor Christian Boessen and his team, is an accelerating decline in general rural populations. Overall population growth in rural areas turned negative in 2010, marking a tipping point. The rural workforce that remains is aging and increasingly unable and unwilling to perform strenuous agricultural labor. Researchers expect this trend to accelerate, noting that from 2007 to 2017 the rural labor force shrank in seven of the eight largest hog-producing states.

Meanwhile, more immediately, the U.S. labor market is getting stronger, with the U.S. unemployment rate falling from 10 percent in 2009 to 4.1 percent in early 2018. This low rate of national unemployment still understates the tight labor supply in most of the largest hog production states where unemployment is near or below three percent.

Immigration trends indeed are exacerbating the problem, the study notes.

While immigrants offset the decline in the native-born population and labor force over the last 30 years, that trend had likely reversed even before political sentiment toward tightening the borders emerged. An increasing portion of the wave of immigrant workers that came to the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s are aging beyond their prime working years, and improving economies immigrant-sending countries are likely to limit the number of newcomers.

“These trends, in an environment of tighter immigration rules and enforcement, combined with the negative growth in native-born rural populations almost certainly portend decades of increasingly difficult labor market conditions for all rural firms including hog producing firms,” the researchers state in the study.

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